Winamp clone in Swift for macOS

https://github.com/mgreenwood1001/winamp

by hyperbole • 8 months ago

262 155 8 months ago

hyperbole• 8 months ago

A winamp clone for os/x - interested in learning swift, and wanted a stable version of winamp for os/x - two itches scratched

mabedan• 8 months ago

Nice. Maybe next step can be integration with one of the music services

antonyh4• 8 months ago

Apple Music would seem the obvious choice.

bni• 8 months ago

asimovDev• 8 months ago

What was the most fun and least fun you had while learning Swift for this project?

I remember having trouble making a Swift UI for my C app because I forgot to disable sandboxing in Xcode project settings. Spent a frustrating two hours debugging

andreww_young• 8 months ago

Memories from over 20 years ago, but later I switched to foobar. I prefer foobar's simple interface. Does anyone still remember foobar?

accrual• 8 months ago

I do! I also went from Winamp to Foobar 2000 for a few years.

Then I discovered an actively maintained modern patch for the final Winamp called WACUP, and now I'm back to daily driving that instead. :)

https://getwacup.com/

worble• 8 months ago

remember foobar

It's still being actively developed

stackghost• 8 months ago

Does anyone still remember foobar?

I remember foobar. I also seem to recall that it does not really whip the llama's ass.

MangoToupe• 8 months ago

I've never seen os x written like that. I assumed it was a version of os/2 I had never heard of.

tonyedgecombe• 8 months ago

Not only that but it hasn't been called OS/X for nearly a decade.

dylan6042• 8 months ago

was it ever called OS/X?

runjake3• 8 months ago

It was never called "OS/X"[1]. I've never even seen it called that colloquially until today.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS

deathwarmedover• 8 months ago

I wondered initially if this was a winamp port for older macs.

It requires macOS 13.0 (High Sierra, 2017) or later, which is several releases after it stopped being called OS X. 10.11 (El Capitan, 2015) was the last OS X.

Jeremy1026• 8 months ago

The repo only goes back a week. I just think OP hasn't kept up with Apple's naming conventions.

Wowfunhappy3• 8 months ago

Careful! High Sierra is actually macOS 10.13.

By contrast, macOS 13 is Ventura, from 2022.

(I personally would accept someone referring to High Sierra as “OS X” because it’s still version 10 of the Macintosh OS, even if Apple dropped that branding a few years earlier.)

rollcat3• 8 months ago

As an occasional enjoyer of OS X 10.5 on PowerPC, I can recommend... iTunes. It is actually really decent, as is most of Jobs-era stuff.

I don't have anything to play FLAC or Vorbis, but the machine has more urgent problems... <https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/>

jonhohle• 8 months ago

Not taking anything away from the project, which looks very cool, but it also probably doesn’t compile on OS X. Looks like minimum macOS version is 13.

HeckFeck2• 8 months ago

IBM won the long game. They secretly acquired Apple, but you weren't meant to know that yet. Not even Tim Cook knows. Big Blue's lawyers will be writing politely to the author of this project, and teaming up with the gutted remains of Nullsoft to sue them for copyright infringement.

wheybags• 8 months ago

Of course they mean OS/X Warp, the Apple x IBM OS collaboration the world forgot.

linguae• 8 months ago

I know this was in jest, but had some of Apple’s and IBM’s 1990s plans came to fruition, we could’ve ended up with an operating system capable of running both OS/2 and Taligent (the original planned successor to the classic Mac OS) applications on PowerPC hardware (one of the few parts of the Apple/IBM collaboration that was realized):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS

OS/X Warp sounds a lot cooler than Workplace OS.

eknkc• 8 months ago

https://webamp.org/

AuthorizedCust• 8 months ago

Does it whip the llama’s ass?

Razengan• 8 months ago

Llamas are cute, do not hurt them please

esafak• 8 months ago

Whips the vicuña's ass.

Lalabadie• 8 months ago

Personal opinion: Alpacas are cute, llamas are mostly huge and menacing.

treetalker• 8 months ago

it really does

iso1631• 8 months ago

Or does it lick it?

#misheardLyrics

racl101• 8 months ago

#demolitionManReference

yohannparis• 8 months ago

Great job! I'm sure it was a lot of fun to produce.

xenophonf2• 8 months ago

Pretty misleading headline. This isn't actually Winamp. It's someone's attempt at a clone.

antonyh4• 8 months ago

It's a clone with a stolen name, and given that it's not been abandoned it's likely they'll come down on this like a bag of hammers.

stronglikedan• 8 months ago

Seems like Mr. Greenwood may be too green to know what's coming!

dang2• 8 months ago

Ok, we've cloned the title above.

(Submitted title was "Winamp for OS/X")

xenophonf2• 8 months ago

Thanks, Dang. You're the bestest.

littlecranky67• 8 months ago

Great project, I am using Audacious from homebrew with an XMMS skin to recreate the experience - but it struggles with HiRes displays amongst other things.

You should, however, change the name. I am pretty sure the name Winamp is trademarked and you can get into legal trouble.

BruceEel6• 8 months ago

Nice! Speaking of Winamp - are you using any alternative music player for iOS that you would recommend?

randomgermanguy• 8 months ago

I started using https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor a while ago.

Though design is more akin to the default Apple Music app than WinAmp.

BruceEel6• 8 months ago

Interesting! Will be checking it out.

runlevel1• 8 months ago

I've wanted a music player like the early versions of iTunes for a while, and this looks like it might fit the bill.

Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app

HeckFeck2• 8 months ago

Can't go wrong with FB2k: https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

It now has a last.fm plugin, so let's get scrobbling!

BruceEel6• 8 months ago

sweet! Thx!

runjake3• 8 months ago

Corrected link for iOS (TIL!): https://www.foobar2000.org/ios

zeroonetwothree• 8 months ago

I like Swinsian (assuming you mean MacOS)

TimTheTinker• 8 months ago

I really liked this too, but balked at the license fee and ended up not paying.

in_a_hole• 8 months ago

Swinsian was the only Mac music player I could find that could come close to replicating my old MusicBee setup. The license fee was annoying but I paid it anyway and have no regrets.

rollcat3• 8 months ago

Decoupled: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/decoupled/id1382409837>

100% offline-only. Open in Finder, drag&drop music, enjoy the untethered experience.

BruceEel6• 8 months ago

That's exactly what I like, airplane mode-friendly. Thanks!

jamesgeck0• 8 months ago

I love Decoupled, but the lack of updates and Apple's tendency to delist unmaintained iOS apps makes me nervous. I swapped over to VLC last year.

microflash• 8 months ago

I’ve been using Jewelcase for a while. https://apps.apple.com/in/app/jewelcase/id6642683626

BruceEel6• 8 months ago

Excellent, I like offline players best.

bitwize• 8 months ago

Does not use the macOS standard toolkit or comply with Apple user interface guidelines.

One MacWorld mouse out of five.

hirako2000• 8 months ago

The original likely infringed all Windows design principles.

Yet they pulled off one of the most usable media player.

Wowfunhappy3• 8 months ago

Windows users don’t care about Windows design principles because there basically aren’t any.

dardeaup• 8 months ago

Would you expect a WinAmp clone to comply with Apple's user interface guidelines?

dpflan• 8 months ago

This def needs skins next: https://skins.webamp.org/

mocko• 8 months ago

https://archive.org/details/winampskins_major_tom_v5_1 was a true work of art

netsharc• 8 months ago

It feels like making a UI with skins is a lot easier. Just draw the bitmap onto the window, and set some areas to be clickable (and change the bitmap of that area to "button is being pushed" when the user is holding the mouse down)...

tomislavpet• 8 months ago

Also worth checking out: https://re-amp.ru

armitron• 8 months ago

No source "freeware", would you trust a binary from a random Russian developer to not contain/deliver a trojan?

wang_li• 8 months ago

Would you trust a binary from a random developer to not contain/deliver a trojan? Russianness has nothing to do with it.

nurettin• 8 months ago

No source freeware from Russia was the norm back in the 90s.

Dwedit• 8 months ago

The page itself has a more accurate description (Winamp *clone* in swift for OS/X) than the headline here.

Since the actual Winamp had a questionable source code release, it could feasibly have been ported to other platforms, so we need to know that it is in fact a clone, and not a port of the real Winamp.

dang2• 8 months ago

Ok, we've changed the title now. (Submitted title was "Winamp for OS/X")

shevy-java• 8 months ago

I liked winamp when I was using windows.

I think any winamp clone should run on OSX Windows and Linux.

I understand that cross-platform code may be annoying, but we really need applications that work on the three main operating systems.

dpark3• 8 months ago

I’m not entirely sure we need a Winamp clone on MacOS anyway. It seems unreasonable to expect that everyone who ever builds consumer software should make it work on every machine, though.

Why not also insist that it should work on iOS and Android? Those are undoubtedly the most commonly-used OSes at this point.

wiseowise• 8 months ago

It seems unreasonable to expect that everyone who ever builds consumer software should make it work on every machine, though

It’s not. Stop supporting vendor lock-in toolkits and you’re golden.

antonyh4• 8 months ago

If it doesn't run on Windows, how can it call itself Winamp? Macosamp makes more sense.

rollcat3• 8 months ago

OS/Xamp perhaps.

Joking aside, there's Audacious[1], which is an excellent and cross-platform player, with support for Winamp skins. Also check out WebAmp[2] and the skin museum[3].

[1] <https://audacious-media-player.org> [2] <https://webamp.org> [3] <https://skins.webamp.org>

antonyh4• 8 months ago

OS/Xamp, pronounced Oh-sex-amp :o)

Arubis• 8 months ago

[MacAMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAmp) was real and official, directly from Nullsoft, a million years ago.

fmbb• 8 months ago

Fun and easy to reskin as well!

Lammy• 8 months ago

There was also “Winamp:Mac” 0.71 alpha version official from Nullsoft: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/winampmac

Its awkward name was because “MacAMP” dev became third-party: https://macintoshgarden.org/author/subband-software

agildehaus• 8 months ago

reAmp (https://re-amp.ru/) is a faithful recreation as well, but no updates since 2020 (and not OSS)

runjake3• 8 months ago

Minor point: I read this as OS/2. The author may want to correct that. macOS naming and versioning is confusing enough.

macOS was never known as OS/X. It was formerly known as OS X and Mac OS X.

As a former OS/2 user, it really threw me off for a second.

Also, you're using a trademark ("Winamp") in the name. So, expect a C&D from Llama Group or whomever.

Aside from that, it looks really nice and well-designed! And it's in Swift and not some janky Electron app. Good job on those fronts!

tracker1• 8 months ago

Same, actually... I'd probably just say "for macOS" at this point, since it is the current term from what I understand.

Aside: the project seems interesting enough, didn't see support for (icecast) streaming listed in the project though, which although less common today still exists.

zekyl314• 8 months ago

100%! I first read as OS/2 as well, and was like interesting.

fortran77• 8 months ago

That's how I read it, too! I got excited! "Finally," I thought "I can run WinAmp on my OS/2 Machine". Then I clicked to the repo and saw it was just a Mac thing.

echelon_musk• 8 months ago

Every single time something like this comes up I feel compelled to mention Audacious.

See my previous comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32779590

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965620

Like most days, I am using it right now on macOS.

WD-42• 8 months ago

Supports old Winamp skins too, which is the whole point!

theoldgreybeard3• 8 months ago

Why does the title call it OS/X? It's macOS and it's described that way on the repo.

Unfortunately his is just a recreation rather than an actual port, since the license for the source that was released prevents derivative works.

Foobar2000 is the spiritual successor to Winamp and it runs on Windows and macOS as well as mobile.

ryandrake• 8 months ago

The "About" section on that page says "Winamp clone in swift for OS/X" but their description says "Winamp macOS [...] A native macOS application..." Not sure I understand what OS/X is--I thought it said OS/2 for a second.

theoldgreybeard3• 8 months ago

Oh, I originally missed it on the side I only looked in the README.

I don't think it was ever called OS/X? It's been called OS X and Mac OS X but never OS/X.

efields• 8 months ago

Foobar2000… now there's an app I haven't heard of in (checks calendar) nearly 20 years. Glad it's still kicking.

theoldgreybeard3• 8 months ago

It's still a wonderful piece of software and actively supported.

stalfosknight• 8 months ago

Why do people insist on still calling macOS "OS X" (or "OS/X" for that matter)?

dpark3• 8 months ago

Why do people insist on calling “X” “Twitter”?

When something has a name for 15 years, it tends to be pretty sticky.

“OS/X”, though, that’s just someone messed up and jumbled two names together.

incanus77• 8 months ago

I mean, muscle memory & fatigue may be part of it. I used MacOS for a number of years, then I used Mac OS X for 8 years, then OS X for 5 years, and now macOS for 9 years.

During that time I also used Windows and Linux from time to time. Their names didn't change in a way where just calling them that was perceived as incorrect.

viraptor• 8 months ago

Rebellion against meaningless name changes. Why does Apple insist on calling Mac OS an OS X, Mac OS X, macOS?

mrits• 8 months ago

Not everyone cares about the marketing departments feelings

speed_spread• 8 months ago

Had Apple given their OS a proper name, I assure you people would use it. You shouldn't use the "OS" moniker as part an OS's name. It's redundant, like naming your child "Human Child Jimmy". Obviously people will take all sorts of shortcuts around it, which you will not have control over, leading to weird "HC/Jim" and the likes.

It's a bit like "U.S.A." not being a proper country's _name_. I mean, would you name you children "Coherent-Enough Assemblage of Bodyparts"? You keep that long-form stuff for the _description_ field! Somebody fucked up when they filled out the form, ain't no fixing it now.

abanana• 8 months ago

Indeed. We in "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" made an even bigger fuckup filling out our form, particularly when the Short Name field is populated with the generic-sounding "United Kingdom" instead of a proper name.

skyyler• 8 months ago

This is not for OS X, this is for macOS 13.0 or later.

OS X is macOS 10. This application does not open on macOS 10.14.6.

anthk• 8 months ago

QMMP should run under OSx.

dmitrygr• 8 months ago

Native app!!! It is not a trashpile of javascript plus a huge copy of V8. Warms my heart! Thank you!

conradfr• 8 months ago

Obvious difference with the real Winamp, bugs etc:

- Can't copy/paste a folder

- EQ and Playlist are not detachable / moveable

- No library

- Does not restore the playlist at launch

- Crashes when playing a flac file

- Does it needs to auto play the winamp mp3 at launch?

pbalau• 8 months ago

Re your last point: Duh!

The only reason to use a Winamp clone is nostalgia.

dmix• 8 months ago

I use Vox which is pretty close https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

They also have cloud syncing for your Flac audio files, that part costs $$ but it's nice if you have lots of lossless rips/torrents.

newman314• 8 months ago

Missed a chance to call this swiftamp instead and avoid namespace collision.

debo_• 8 months ago

machamp

lacy_tinpot• 8 months ago

Isn't that a Pokeman?

brulard• 8 months ago

Or swamp to be shorter

sachahjkl• 8 months ago

finally.. good software

teekert• 8 months ago

Ah I miss the days when my own music felt like something valuable (now it feels like a mess). When I’d turn on music via the computer (using xmms or Amarok hooked up to the amplifier. I feel a bit like Sonos and iOS/Android and Spotify are a trap. And I fell for it. I’m getting old.

superultra• 8 months ago

Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.

cyberpunk• 8 months ago

milkdrop and project m, those were the days.

Why aren’t these really a thing anymore? Does anyone know any non-shit way to get nice visuals from apple music or spotify or whatever these days?

musictubes• 8 months ago

There are some visualizers in the Mac App Store. I'm using Ferromagnetic right now and like it well enough. There are still visualizers in Apple Music left over from the iTunes days but they're kind of lame.

Fnoord• 8 months ago

If you look at [1] you can see some derivations from Milkdrop/Project M.

There were a lot of other, good visual plugins and software. VJ software, specifically, but also Libvisual just abstracts input and output, therefore allowing you to use all of these (supported) visualization plugins on any supported media player. It isn't much developed anymore these days, but this is the correct way forward.

Looking at the actors in Livisual [3] G-Force is decent but also a couple may be missing from earlier Libvisual releases. You may also like Lemuria [4]. Winamp's AVS is also FOSS [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MilkDrop

[2] https://github.com/Libvisual/libvisual

[3] https://github.com/Libvisual/libvisual/tree/master/libvisual...

[4] https://github.com/dr-ni/lemuria-2.1.1

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio

wj• 8 months ago

Agreed. I would love Plex (or PlexAmp and then cast) to have some built in visualizations. And I have no idea why some of those streaming EDM channels on YouTube aren't doing music visualizations rather than ten second loops of video.

neckro23• 8 months ago

Milkdrop and Project M are both available as vis plugins for Foobar2k, on Windows at least: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_vis_milk2

hnlmorg• 8 months ago

Project M is still around. I use it to project visualisations at house parties.

mrbuttons454• 8 months ago

Geiss source is available now. Maybe it should be ported :) https://github.com/geissomatik/geiss

insin• 8 months ago

I was pleasantly surprised to find Soulseek is still active

alterom• 8 months ago

Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.

You can still do that. Winamp runs just fine on Windows 10/11.

lproven2• 8 months ago

Been running Foobar 2000 for macOS for a year, but this is pretty in a retro way, I guess.

https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

<- the least bollocks-infested media player on macOS since about, oh, September 2000.

undeveloper• 8 months ago

vlc..?

twelvedogs• 8 months ago

it's a good player but it's always been clunky and oddly buggy

maybe it's less so on mac but on linux i get random long pauses on video playlist playback that often end with it just stopping

lproven2• 8 months ago

I am a big fan of VLC, and I just wrote an article about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/12/vlc_guru_gong/

But VLC is a multi-function tool that can play audio and video.

Foobar is, as far as I can tell, just an audio player. It's more focussed and consequently smaller and simpler. That's what I like about it.

I keep both on my machines and I use both... but I use VLC for video, and Foobar for just listening to music.

jchw• 8 months ago

foobar2000 was released for macOS in around 2017, and I'm pretty sure it's still not really at parity with the Windows version. Not that it's bad, but just saying.

ks2048• 8 months ago

iOS version? Considering ditching Spotify for local files.

WorldPeas• 8 months ago

IOS vlc is pretty good, it lets you open a fs directory

VerifiedReports4• 8 months ago

I was not a fan of WinAmp in its heyday because I thought all the "skins" sucked.

Wow, have times changed. I look at this screenshot now: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mgreenwood1001/winamp/refs...

and think about how usable this looks. Buttons are demarcated clearly. The scrub bar is big enough to grab. Everything is legible.

UI sucks now.

Meanwhile... seeing the lyrics in that shot makes me wonder if WinAmp supports karaoke playback...

I guess the original did through plug-ins. Hm, maybe I'll take a shot at adding it to this one.

bcraven• 8 months ago

I often see these 'clones' of winamp and for some reason they all use skins that look like shit.

As someone who still uses winamp (via Wacup) I can swear by the 'Bento' skin that is not a garish nightmare.

https://www.deviantart.com/unpopularpizza/art/Winamp-Big-Ben...

VerifiedReports4• 8 months ago

The skin I saw most often back in the day had some dumb non-rectangular shape with a "texture" on it and the controls scattered all over the place. Right in line with the "skinning" fad of the early 2000s, which defeated the intuitiveness of GUIs and decades of their evolution.

Then came the even-dumber "transparent-UI" fad.

Fortunately both those died. Oh but wait: Here comes Apple, exhuming one of them in 2025! But Apple has always hated customization, so they probably won't be resurrecting "skins" too.

layer8• 8 months ago

I’m in the minority who thinks that having a “skin” in the first place already goes against good UI. Hence foobar2000 all the way.

sysworld• 8 months ago

It's a shame this too doesn't play/pause with space bar.. like Spotify, drives me nuts.

zie• 8 months ago

It's MIT licensed, so you can add it. they might even take a patch. I agree it's pretty lame when the space bar doesn't play/pause media in players though.

misnome• 8 months ago

It is supposed to in Mac Spotify, it’s just a bug that apparently isn’t important enough to fix.

You can hit Tab then Space, and it works normally (yes this is fucking awful).

aschen• 8 months ago

The best Winamp clone for macOS is still Re:AMP https://re-amp.ru/

If you want the original Winamp experience with full support of M3U playlist then don't go further than Re:AMP

rc_kas• 8 months ago

latest release was 5 years ago

ccakes• 8 months ago

Don’t mess with perfection

slim• 8 months ago

what do you mean ? the last release was 22 years ago. This is just trying to be the perfect copy of that.

kayodelycaon• 8 months ago

This is awesome and I wish I could use it. Like a lot of people, I don’t have a music folder, just Apple Music.

I have a few things scattered across my Dropbox account I could collect. (Unless it could somehow use downloaded songs from Apple Music.)

Streaming music services are a blessing and a curse. I could never afford or collect the vast number of albums in my library. So lack of ownership isn’t a problem for me. The only downside is I have to use their app, which they have zero incentive to improve. :(

me551ah• 8 months ago

Who even has mp3s and music files lying around locally anyway. I miss Winamp and want to run it again, but since I mostly use streaming services I can’t anymore

dur-randir• 8 months ago

Still, in the year 2025, the only offline player that stays in menu bar and doesn't clutter the dock is Vox.

mark_l_watson2• 8 months ago

I may not use this but I just had a pleasant five minutes reading through some of the source code. Off topic, but: I currently think Swift is the most interesting non-Lisp language. I tried Rust and didn’t particularly like it and I have given up using Haskell on anything but small fun projects.

Great to see useful open source projects. I now pay for YouTube Music but I still have an enormous library of MP3 music files that I have purchased over the years so I probably will build and run this player, at least for a few days.

mark_l_watson2• 8 months ago

EDIT: I just tried it, nice!

dtgriscom• 8 months ago

404 error? Matt Greenwood's page is still there, but the winamp repository is gone. (Not all that surprising, as I expect "winamp" is trademarked, although there are still some other Github "winamp" repositories.)

gullevek• 8 months ago

URL dead, 404 ...

Winamp clone in Swift for macOS

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